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Four doctoral candidates at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have received 2009-2010 fellowships from the U.S. Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program.

The four awards, which fund study in modern foreign languages and area studies for six to 12 months, total nearly $148,000. Fulbright-Hays fellowships support projects expected to deepen research knowledge and help national development capability in areas of the world not generally included in U.S. curricula.

The awards were made through UNC’s Center for Global Initiatives, which provides numerous funding opportunities for students and faculty to pursue international research. The center also supports campus groups and student organizations that promote a more globalized student and community experience.

Listed below are the new fellows and their hometowns, disciplines and doctoral research projects.

Timothy Baird of Portland, Maine, a geography student, will travel to Tanzania to study how parks influence the social-ecological systems around them and what effect this influence has on ecosystem integrity and human well-being. In a case study, he will research northern Tanzania’s Tarangire National Park and nearby communities.

Baird will examine how challenges and opportunities associated with the park have influenced livelihood strategies, how changing livelihoods have engendered new inter-household economic transactions, and how changing transactions impact demographic patterns and income.

Edward Geist, a history student, will travel to Russia to conduct research for his dissertation, “Two Worlds of Civil Defense: State, Society, and Nuclear Survival in the USA and USSR, 1945-1991.” He will study the Soviet civil defense program from the introduction of nuclear weapons in 1945 until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. Geist will develop a comparative account of American and Soviet civil defense.

Defined as the use of measures such as shelter and evacuation to reduce damage to life and property caused by enemy attack, civil defense presents an ideal means for exploring the impact of the arms race on Soviet citizens, because it was the area in which nuclear weapons policy most affected everyday life, Geist said. By examining ways in which the two superpowers prepared their citizens to survive enemy attacks, his dissertation will seek to understand why Soviet and American citizens envisioned nuclear war in different ways, and how these visions affected official policy and popular imagination.

Laura Premack, of Lexington, Mass., a history student, will travel to Brazil and Nigeria to study Pentecostalism in each country. In a global historical approach, she will treat the two countries not as separate phenomena but as parts of a whole.

Pentecostalism is a global religious movement that is growing at an extraordinary pace, Premack said. Brazil and Nigeria, countries linked historically by the transatlantic slave trade, are home to two of the largest Pentecostal populations in the world. Her research will seek to demonstrate a link between traditional African religious beliefs and Pentecostal practices by investigating the centrality of spirit-possession to both.

Rachana Umashankar of India, an anthropology student, will return to her native country to study different views on proper Islamic practice and belief, which have become prominent since 9/11. Such differences have led to the formation of alliances and antagonisms among Muslim groups within both religious and secular nation-states, she said.

Discussions of Islam in the popular media and academia often suggest that Islamic groups gather strength for their interpretations of Islamic practice and belief when backed by Islamic states, and by conforming to reformist orthodoxy, Umashankar said. She will examine ways through which shrine-based Sufism in India, one of the oldest forms of Islamic practice in the subcontinent, may resist oppositional Islamic reformist movements by finding an unexpected ally in the secular Indian nation-state.

Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program Web site: http://www.ed.gov/programs/iegpsddrap/index.html

Center for Global Initiatives contact: Terry Meyer, (919) 843-4887, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
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